fall
left him with a bruised limb, which confined him to his room from the
7th of December till the middle of February (1787).

During these weeks he suffered much from low spirits, and the letters
which he then wrote under the influence of that hypochondria and
despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with
himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose
or verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim of
rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility,
and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p. 082)
die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best.
Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me through
this to me miserable world! I have a hundred times wished that one
could resign life, as an officer resigns a commission; for I would not
take in any poor wretch by selling out. Lately I was a sixpenny
private, and, God knows, a miserable soldier enough; now I march to
the campaign, a starving cadet--a little more conspicuously wretched."

But his late want of success on the banks of Devon, and his consequent
despondency, were alike dispelled from his thoughts by a new
excitement. Just at the time when he met with his accident, he had
made the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. M'Lehose, and acquaintance all
at once became a violent attachment on both sides. This lady had been
deserted by her husband, who had gone to the West Indies, leaving her
in poverty and obscurity to bring up two young boys as best she might.
We are told that she was "of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty, of
lively and easy manners, of a poetical fabric of mind, with some wit,
and not too high a degree of refinement or delicacy--exactly the kind
of woman to fascinate Burns." Fascinated he certainly was. On the 30th
December he writes; "Almighty love still reigns and revels in my
bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young
Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than
the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisoned
arrow of the savage African." For several months his visits to her
house were frequent, his letters unremitting. The sentimental
correspondence which they began, in which Burns addresses her as
Clarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has been (p. 083)
published separately, and become notorious. Though this corresponden